‘Was she assaulted? Or attacked? Or injured in any way?’ I pressed for more information.
‘Again, it is too early to tell. It may be that she struggled, but as you can appreciate, Mr Howard, there are rocks and impediments at the bottom of those cliffs.’ The policeman shuddered. ‘Her injuries are, Sir, extensive.’
‘Oh God!’ I closed my eyes, as if trying to blot out the image of Bella lying broken on the rocks below the cliff.
‘We need you as next of kin to formally identify her,’ said the policeman.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to see her like that.’
‘I’m afraid, Mr Howard,’ said the policeman, ‘that it is not an issue open to debate. We will take you there now and then I am sure we will need to investigate further.’
I nodded, helplessly. ‘I am sure you will,’ I said.
***
The policemen took me back with them to the town and there I endured the grisly business of identifying my sister.
It was definitely her. I shall not describe what I saw as even now I cannot bear to picture it, but had I been advised a wild animal had attacked her then threw her mauled carcass from its bloodied jaws into the East Loch, I would have believed it.
Upon my return to Howard House, I re-read the notes I had written about our last, imagined meeting on the hillside at Beltane. My mind kept replaying what I thought had happened, and yet I kept quashing the idea that any of it had been real – it was too far-fetched, even for my creative mind, to think that Bella had been the unwitting victim of the Unseelie Court.
I sought out Ceit for some company, but she was to be found nowhere in Howard House. I should have been used to her coming and going by now; but each time she left, it seemed more difficult for me to imagine her in my world. Then she would return and I would rejoice and we would resume our charmed lives.
Our charmed lives. They were not so charmed now – not since Bella had died. “Died”: I hated that word. I preferred to think that Bella had left me to return to her social life and friends in Hampstead or had flounced off for a day’s shopping or entertainment in Glasgow or Edinburgh. This, in fact, became my way of justifying what had happened. I became adept at stopping my mind conjuring up the image of her dead body and instead transposed it into an image of her laughing or shopping or carrying on with her life elsewhere.
For a while, it almost worked and I almost believed it to be true. Bella was not dead. How could she be? No – she was simply elsewhere. Ceit gradually drifted back into Howard House as well, and she helped me. I coped by throwing myself into my work; sometimes writing fiction; sometimes creating poetry; sometimes finding myself drawing pictures of Bella both before and after the accident. But no; Bella was not dead. She was alive in London.
And so the pictures of her shredded flesh went into the fire and the drawing room was adorned with images of her as she had been in life. What did I mean, though, “as she had been in life”? For she was still alive was she not, and living in London...
It was an interminable time. It was almost a relief, therefore, when the policeman came back to my door and looked at me very solemnly and very seriously and said that they were treating Bella’s accident as a murder.
‘What accident?’ I asked them. ‘Bella is alive and well and living in London! How dare you come and tell me such lies!’
I slammed the door on the startled policeman and intended to withdraw into my work.
***
Chapter Thirty Four
I did not do a great deal of work in the end and I dozed off at my desk that evening.
Ceit had been distant and try as I might to engage with her, and equally, she with me, it just was not the best arrangement at the moment. I think she understood it was for the best to leave me be for a time. I cannot have been very good company. And so, she absented herself – to where, I did not know.
But I was exhausted, the police had remained at my door shouting information through to me and asking questions, trying to cajole me into opening the door, trying to shock me by saying my Groom had mentioned some very interesting information regarding me being in an insensible state the morning after Bella allegedly disappeared; but I would not be drawn.
‘Go away, go away!’ I kept repeating. Until eventually I staggered throughout the house, locking all the doors solidly, ensuring all the windows were shut tightly and finally laying my head down on my desk.
My tattered dreams were disturbed, and not in the usual way. Not by Ceit. Not by me waking in my bed and having her next to me.
I missed Ceit desperately; and in my more rational moments, I missed Bella. Although I also knew my sister was alive and well and living in London.
Bella must have been on my mind that evening – I suppose having people at the door advising me she was dead might have brought the apparition of her into my thoughts; but I swear I saw her standing before me, in the state she had been in when I last saw her – battered, bloodied, bruised. No! Alive and well and gloriously beautiful. Yes – that was her; that was better.
I feared my mind was unravelling. Why on earth would I be imagining her dead? How awful, how hideous to encounter such absurdity.
‘Ceit?’ I tried calling for my lover, but she did not come. ‘Bella? Bella-Beautiful?’ I tried calling for my sister. But of course she was in London.
‘There’s a book—’
Bella’s voice uttered those words urgently and my eyes snapped open.
‘Bella?’ I sat up, staring around the drawing room.
A woman wavered in and out of focus, just in the corner of the room. A woman dressed in white. She either wore an olive-green travelling coat or a black cloak on top of the white column of her outfit. Did she have dark hair? Was it my Ceit? Or did she have strawberry blonde hair? Was it my Bella?
I sat up and whipped my head around; but the figure had vanished. I saw it again in a different corner of the room. Again, I turned to catch her. The woman vanished, dissipating into thin, smoky mist. She re-appeared elsewhere, just out of sight. I heard laughing.
‘There’s a book—’
I scraped the chair away from the desk and stood up.
‘Where? Where is the book?’
The drawing room door flung open, crashing against the frame and I cried out in horror.
‘There’s a book.’
The phrase disappeared on a gust of wind – the words were carried upstairs and echoed around the empty corridors on the first floor.
‘Where? Show me. Show me the book.’ I chased the words out of the drawing room, through the hallway, up the stairs. I heard them whip around a corner and I stumbled after them. They bounced off the walls and I was surrounded by them.
And I found myself outside Bella’s bedroom, being coaxed in by those words: ‘There is a book, there is a book.’
Those words were taunting me now, somewhat, daring me to go into the room and find whatever book they referred to. What else could I do? A complicated pile of pots and pans and skillets were stacked up in front of the door and I kicked them aside. Then I took hold of the handle and flung the door wide.
An even wilder gust of wind blew down the chimney and whirled around the room, covering everything with soot and ash and dust. Coughing and choking, my forearm pressed against my mouth, I ducked down and entered the room.
‘The fireplace!’
The words changed, the tone becoming more excited as I progressed through the miasma to the fireplace, groping my way there through a smog thicker and danker than I think I had ever encountered in London.
More words bounced around the room: ‘”The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers to bed; 'tis almost fairy time”’
I halted. Midsummer Night’s Dream? My sister’s favourite play? What bearing did that have on my mission now?
There was a giggle, almost exactly like Bella’s and it made me spin around to see if she’d followed me into the room in corporeal form.
‘Iron
!’
The words echoed, breathy in the foul room.
‘Iron?’ I shouted back, feeling ridiculous.
‘The iron tongue of midnight...’
‘Iron?’ I stared around the room, my eyes drawn to the fireplace. The fire irons were arranged in a strange tent-like structure. Within the structure I saw something rectangular.
With a jolt, I realised that the rectangular object was a book. Someone had placed a book inside an iron prison? Created an iron barrier to the room? I could not fully comprehend any of it.
‘Is this it? Is this the book?’
There was no response, just an almost excitable crackling of what I can only describe as static electricity, and a feeling in the air as if a great storm was about to whip up inside the room.
I plunged my hand into the iron tent and grabbed hold of the book, the fire irons clattering to the floor and rolling around wildly. There was an almost unearthly shriek from somewhere nearby and the sound struck me to the marrow.
I turned with the intention of running as fast as possible out of that room. However, I had not done more than face the door when I saw the pile of iron equipment which had been outside the room was now stacked up higgledy piggledy within the room, blocking my access to the door.
‘What is this?’ I shouted. ‘Who is here?’ I spun around, but there were no clues in the room and there was certainly no other living being in there with me
I glanced down at the volume in my hands and read the title. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, by W.B. Yeats. I recognised the book as one my uncle had kept on one of the highest shelves of the library, well away from my impressionable little sister who wished to believe in gossamer wings and magic wishes, rather than the ugly truth about the Celtic Fae people – there was a great crossover, Ruairí had told me, about the Celtic legends and the Scottish Fae.
I clutched the book to my chest, staring about me, my heart pounding. What did this have to do with anything? Once more, I caught sight of the pile of ironworks blocking my entrance and, suddenly realising, my stomach somersaulted.
It was not a barrier. It was protection.
***
Chapter Thirty Five
I recalled a tale about a Changeling child.
Ruairí had told us that a simple charm, such as a pair of iron scissors laid open by the crib, would have protected the unfortunate baby from being carried off by the fairies. Bella had worried away at this story for weeks, insisting on sleeping with scissors by her bed and piling fire irons up before the grate and next to the door in the hope that bad fairies would not come to visit her in the night.
It was shortly after that, the Yeats book had disappeared. Even Ruairí knew when enough was enough and my sister was far too fanciful at the best of times.
I looked at the fire irons, still lying on the hearthrug and teetering before the doorway. I sank down to my knees, still clutching the book. This was Bella’s doing. This was her way of telling me something.
‘Oh, God. Bella,’ I whispered. With shaking hands, I opened the book. A piece of paper fluttered out – a page from another book, torn out in a hurry, ragged at the edges and stuffed in as some kind of bookmark. I laid the Fairies book on the ground, face-down at the page marked and picked up the loose sheet.
It was out of one of the poetry collections Ruairí had adored. La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats. I frowned as I scanned quickly through the words I had never paid very much attention to in the past, then laid it aside.
I picked up the book again and saw that Bella - I assume it had been Bella - had used it to mark a particular page. This page had scrawled notes all over it; it had comments annotated in the margin and I recognised two distinct hands – the careful, round letters of my sister and the elegant copperplate of my Uncle.
The title read, very simply: Leannán Sídhe.
I continued to read the body of text.
The Leanhaun Shee (fairy mistress) seeks the love of mortals. If they refuse, she must be their slave; if they consent, they are hers, and can only escape by finding another to take their place. The fairy lives on their life, and they waste away. Death is no escape from her. She is the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she persecutes. The Gaelic poets die young, for she is restless, and will not let them remain long on earth—this malignant phantom.
It didn’t make much sense to me. I read and re-read the words, puzzling over the relevance and pondered over why Bella ad Ruairí had dug out this old book and defaced it as such. I could not abide people defacing books and was more than a little shocked to think that my Uncle, who was a writer, should treat something as precious as a book so rashly. One of the two annotators, for example, had underlined the words The fairy lives on their life, and they waste away extraordinarily heavily, almost ripping the paper through to the next page.
I picked up the poem again, meaning only to replace it as a bookmark, when I glanced at the words again.
And then it struck me.
My mouth was dry as I read and re-read the words.
I learned how Keats’ young Knight, enthralled by love, realised he was imprisoned on a cold hillside instead of romping happily with his mysterious lover. I read how her strange language had enchanted him; how his perfect life was nothing more than a nightmare instigated by a beautiful woman. How her previous victims had surrounded him with ‘horrid warning’. How all of her victims had been of a type.
I looked up from the book and felt suddenly the strength draining from me as everything began to crowd in on me and pieces of an unseen puzzle began to fall into place.
My gaze drifted over to the pile of iron implements by the door and the fact that the book had been concealed beneath a pile of iron.
I staggered to my feet and felt my way over to the large window, hanging onto furniture as I struggled to get across the room. I caught sight of myself in the looking glass and was shocked and horrified by my ghastly reflection. Had someone suggested I was a walking revenant, a ghoul or a decaying corpse it would not have surprised me. I averted my gaze, and continued to the window. Holding onto the frame, I stared at the neat line of white crystals on both the inner and outside sills. Salt. Of course. A well-known defence against the Fae.
Bella had prepared this. Bella had remembered all the stories Ruairí had filled our minds with and had put aside her practical ways to suspend her disbelief and try to mitigate something I could not quite put into words.
Ceit.
No. No. I refused to believe it. I looked out across the gardens and saw her dancing in the shadows, dipping in and out of sight.
I thought of the book she had presented me with – the identification of her strange language and the fact my Uncle had such a book in his library; ironically, amongst his poetry books. Was this then a clue for one of us to find after his death? But my sister had been the one to do it. My clever, sensible, sister. Not me. Not the unbalanced man I had become in the wake of Ceit’s existence. Had this Yeats book been on the shelves beside it, annotated, ready for one of us to find and understand what might have happened to Ruairí?
All I could concentrate on, all I had ever concentrated on for months was Ceit.
I thought of the way she had communicated with me so many times without words. The way she had haunted my dreams, both my waking ones and my nightmares.
I remembered Tarbert Castle and the Beltane festival I thought I had imagined; the ride across the moors and the golden flowers springing up to guide our way. The women I had danced with and feasted with.
I recalled how Ceit had encouraged me to write and to draw and to write and to draw and to write and to draw and... It was relentless. She had been relentless. She had flourished as I sank into ill-health and unreasonable behaviour.
I remembered how Ceit had come as far as the door at Mrs Mackie’s shop – but no further, thanks to the selection of iron hardware and twists of salt that good lady kept by the doorway. Did she know? Did Mrs Mackie know these people e
xisted?
Síthiche Gleann. Fairy Glen. Of course she knew. Of course Ruairí had known; in the end, at least. They had all known.
Except me.
Midsummer, she had told me.
Death is no escape from her.
We had until Midsummer. And then what?
She is the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she persecutes.
A suspicion began to form as I remembered Ruairí’s strange death and I was sickened.
The Gaelic poets die young, for she is restless, and will not let them remain long on earth – this malignant phantom.
The pages of the book rustled behind me in some unnoticed breeze.
‘Bella!’ I cried out. ‘Oh God, what happened to you?’
For I knew without doubt that she was not alive and well and living in London.
I flung myself away from the window and forced myself across the room. I grabbed hold of the book, clutching it in two hands to steady it as I tried to read the handwritten notes.
I made out some of the extra comments: These Fae are invisible to all except the victim. Iron. Salt. Defences. Keats’ poem – the most relevant description to study and understand these creatures. Success, creativity, followed by despondency. She is the muse. She is the inspiration. She has killed me.
I could not read on.
***
Chapter Thirty Six
As the night drew in, I crawled into Bella’s bed and pulled the coverlet up to my chin.
I was reluctant to leave that protected little sanctuary and intended to sleep with a fire iron beneath my pillow. I had skillets and pans before the door and flatirons before the fireplace.
I heard noises in the corridor when the sky had finally darkened and a scratching at the window pane as dawn broke. On several occasions, the door handle rattled. I refused to leave the bed and investigate, even as my heart hammered in my chest and I stared into the silence trying to remember these last few months with more clarity.
Upon the Solstice Page 13